When Diamond GOS was released in 1988, it seemed that the Atari 8-bit finally had a GUI to compete with the Commodore 64's enviably slick and professional GEOS operating system. A very young Alan Reeve had churned out Diamond while studying Computer Science at Northern Illinois Universty. In the face of various marketing and technical problems he managed to produce a cartridge which to all intents and purposes implemented a cut-down version of the Atari ST's GEM desktop on its 8-bit predecessor.

However, while GEOS on the C64 was supported by a number of high-quality applications (a WYSIWYG word processor, desk-top publisher, paint program, BASIC, assembler, and more), Diamond - although it shipped with a rudimentary word processor, paint program, and utility disk - seemed to arrive too late in the life of the Atari 8-bit for third-party software developers to be inspired to create applications for it. Sadly, in fact, I'm not aware of any third party programs which were written for Diamond.

Of course, you could launch "legacy" applications from the Diamond desktop, but I think the system crucially lacked a "killer" GUI application which would have captured the imagination of the software buying public. The "classic" Apple Macintosh famously had no third party applications written for its new operating system prior to its release, but it did ship with the killer Apple apps MacWrite and MacPaint. GEOS had GEOWrite, which, although slow, was a miracle to behold on a 1Mhz 8-bit computer. GEOS was one of the most widely used GUIs in home computing for a while.

Booting Diamond 2 now, one is still impressed by what an achievement it is. Alan Reeve speaks of things he would have done differently now (with the benefit of greater programming experience), and one can only imagine what the mooted version 3 was like.

Diamond isn't the only GUI for the Atari 8-bit. A couple of years after Diamond came out, the SAM (Screen Aided Management) Desktop was released as a commercial product in Germany. SAM had the very considerable advantage of a fairly large range of applications (word processor, paint program, CAD program), custom written for its API. It also boasted a range of accessories and used a software 80-column display.

More recently, the most notable stab at a GUI on the Atari 8-bit has been another German product, Boss-X. This huge project is entirely written in Turbo Basic and is very well presented, using proportional fonts, player/missile graphics for hi-res coloured icons, and a Windows 95-style desktop interface complete with Start Menu.

There have been others, too, such as TRS Desktop and ATOS. None, however, have become an accepted standard for the machine. Some are well-supported by custom applications, but very often the functionality of the application is compromised by the processing required to accomplish the GUI presentation. In all cases, an equivalent text-mode application is likely to have a more complete feature-set (for example, macros or multi-document handling in a word processor). When the bundled applications are accomplished, they very often do not use the GUI interface at all, or use inconsistent presentation. In some cases, the GUIs seem little more than visually impressive launch-pads for legacy, text-mode applications.

Of course, these are not criticisms of the authors of the GUIs. Lack of widespread third-party application support is something that any 8-bit GUI is likely to suffer from, and it is hardly possible for the author of the GUI to write custom applications which duplicate the functionality of the excellent non-GUI software already available. Indeed, the ability of any of the aforementioned Atari GUIs to launch non-GUI applications is a definite advantage, and pretty much a must-have feature if the GUI is to become anything other than an occasionally used curiosity.

Most recently, the Contiki port for the Atari has arrived. Sadly, however, this multi-tasking OS doesn't sport the GUI present in the C64 version, but it's still an exciting platform in active development. Most intriguingly, Contiki will support the forthcoming Atari 8-bit Ethernet cartridge, complete with Twitter client and such like.

Despite there being several GUIs already available for the Atari 8-bit, any mention of "GEOS for the Atari" always seems to generate excitement, perhaps because it calls to mind a professionally presented desktop supported by a accomplished software applications and bundled with tons of proportional fonts in various point sizes. Whatever the reason, I always thought there was room for one more crack at an Atari 8-bit GUI.

In fact, my project had been in the vague planning stage ever since the mid-nineties. However, I lacked the programming skill to make anything of it back then, and what with my ten year Atari hiatus, followed by 18 months finishing The Last Word, it took until January 2011 before I decided to have a proper crack at it.

Next time, I'll talk about what the GUI's going to look like, what it is and isn't going to do, and why it's being programmed using game and demo techniques.